The Cherokee Indians called the place “Eeseeoh,” which means “River of Cliffs.”

Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC

www.historypress.net

Copyright © 2017 by Christopher Blake

All rights reserved

Front cover: View from the Chimneys on the Gorge’s east rim. The pillar to the left is the Camel and ahead lie, first, Table Rock, then Hawksbill Mountain. Behind the view lie Shortoff Mountain and Lake James. Ken Thomas, public domain.

First published 2017

e-book edition 2017

ISBN 978.1.43966.168.0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934946

print edition ISBN 978.1.62585.884.9

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Sacred places are for the most part storied settings: a little part of some great soul cleaved to these walls, to these heights

—Louis Aragon, surrealist poet

In our land [Ireland] there is no river or mountain that is not associated in the memory with some event or legend.…I would have our writers and craftsmen of many kinds master this history and these legends, and fix upon their memory the appearance of mountains and rivers and make it all visible again in their arts.

—W.B. Yeats

For Dorothy Watson, Pete Whelihan, my two brothers Brendan and Pete, and my nephew Alex Blake

TO THE READER

The popular Linville Falls and the Linville Gorge Wilderness Area have been described dozens of times. Both fictional and historical accounts abound, and we have records of this wild and spectacular place that reflect the interest of botanists, geologists, preservationists, outdoors educators, students of pioneer culture, hikers and climbers and historians. No less valuable have been the creative interpretations of poets, painters, novelists and photographers.

This book offers a rich and representative sampling of these varied perspectives, familiarity with which, it is hoped, will deepen your experience of this exceptional place.

—Christopher Blake

CONTENTS

To the Reader

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. The Spangenberg Diary

2. Royal Governor Tryon on the Linville Massacre

3. “Attack on the Linville Party”

4. Daniel Boone and the Linville Massacre

5. Western North Carolina: Its Mountains and Its People to 1880

6. Table Rock Described by Andre Michaux, John Fraser, Elisha Mitchell and Arnold Guyot on Linville Gorge

7. “Sketches of the Pioneers in Burke County History”

8. The Mountain People and Linville Gorge

9. Letters from the Alleghany Mountains

10. Mountain Scenery: The Scenery of the Mountains of Western North Carolina and Northwestern South Carolina

11. The Heart of the Alleghanies, or Western North Carolina

12. “A Mountain Tramp from Bridgewater to Blowing Rock: Sketches of Linville Falls and Bynum’s Bluff”

13. The Balsam Groves of the Grandfather Mountain

Photos

14. Master of the World

15. The Carolina Mountains

16. “A Walking Trip to Table Rock Mountain: July 3–6, 1914”

17. Vacation Days in the Summitlands of the Blue Ridge and Cumberland Mountains

18. The History of Linville Falls

Photos

19. “Linville Gorge Legends”

20. “Bea Hensley Hammers an Iron Chinquapin Leaf on His Anvil Near Spruce Pine and Cogitates on the Nature of Two Beauty Spots”

21. Linville Gorge in the 1950s

22. Outward Bound Journal, or, “How I Skipped School for 26 Days”

23. “Outward Bound—Explore Your Capabilities”

24. Green Beret Radio Exercise in the Pisgah Gorge, June 1969

25. “Linville Gorge Caves”

26. Mountain Yarns, Legends and Lore

27. A History of Watauga County

28. The Lost Airmen of Jonas Ridge

29. A Natural History of Northwest North Carolina

30. “Linville”

31. “The Circle of Life: A Story from Linville”

32. The Last of the Mohicans and Linville Gorge

33. Jane Blalock Holtsclaw, Cherokee Wisewoman and Healer

Recommended Reading

Works Cited

About the Editor

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For all the help I’ve gotten along the way, I am grateful indeed. “One book opens another,” the old alchemists were fond of saying, and in my searches I found authors like Carolyn Sakowski invaluable in pointing out to me source after source—the Jules Verne connection to Table Rock, for example. Her list of works cited at the end of Touring Western North Carolina’s Backroads displays all that is best in a thorough bibliography. Much of my own work has involved merely procuring copies of the materials and providing brief introductory notes to them. And so my debts to other writers, curators and archivists are many and obvious. Here I should like to acknowledge assistance of those individuals and institutions that lent me the most support in my work.

For permission to reprint his poem on Bea Hensley, I heartily thank Mr. Jonathan Williams of Highlands, North Carolina. I thank Fred Brown, editor of Brown’s Guide to Georgia, for the permission to reprint Tom Patterson’s 1978 article “Linville.” Thanks also to editor Jamie Shell at the Avery Journal-Times for letting me include rescue reports from his paper. River benefits greatly from the naturalist gorge expertise shared by local biology professor Stewart Skeate and speleologist Dr. Cato Holler.

For her help with statistical information on the Linville Gorge Wilderness Area, I thank Ms. Miera Crawford of the Grandfather Ranger District Office of the U.S. Forest Service, Pisgah National Forest in Nebo, North Carolina. Interpretive specialist for the Blue Ridge Parkway Jonathan Bennet is to be thanked for bringing Lyman Draper’s biography of Daniel Boone to my notice.

I am highly grateful for the assistance of former special collections librarian Helen D. Wykle at the D. Hiden Ramsey Library of the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Ms. Wykle helped me obtain analog copies of historic photographs from the Ewart M. Ball Photographic Collection and rights of reproduction for them. Serendipitous was it for me to meet a person so well informed about the travel and tourism literature of western North Carolina.

Ms. Norma Myers, curator of East Tennessee State University’s Archives of Appalachia at the Charles C. Sherrod Library, provided me with access to the D.R. Beeson Sr. journal and photographic album record of the trip to Table Rock Mountain that Mr. Beeson made with his friends in 1914. Mr. Beeson’s son D.R. Beeson Jr. of Johnson City, Tennessee, has graciously given permission for the publication of his father’s journal in this book.

Ms. Andrea Fey, former alumni coordinator of the North Carolina Outward Bound School in Asheville, was instrumental in answering my questions about the early years of Outward Bound at Table Rock Mountain. Ms. Fey also kindly let me make a copy of the promotional film Solo (1969), which includes footage of this editor and Anakiwa Crew. Messrs. Dave Mashburn and Jack Shirey were godsends in clarifying certain puzzling references in my Outward Bound 1967 course journal. Ms. Deb Whitmore, program director at Outward Bound, shared valuable insights on the growth of the school over the years since I attended and invited me to tour the much-changed facility.

I thank the staffs of the Carson Library at Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk, North Carolina; the Carol Belk Library at Appalachian State University Library in Boone, North Carolina; and the Burke County Public Library in Morganton, North Carolina. Mr. Keith Longiotti of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library was especially helpful in locating the photographs among the Hugh Morton Collection. Parkway Publisher’s 2005 edition of River put me in touch with Linville living legends Bob Underwood and Allen Hyde—and, through them, the very-much-active Gorge Rats (with its Lady Gorge Rats auxiliary) reached at www.linvillegorge.net. They all expanded my consciousness of this “gorgeous” place.

My Friends of Linville Gorge group (FOLG) has no Internet presence, nor much of an organization, but it offers gorge visits to hikers in good condition. Formed in 1993 around guided mushroom walks or forays conducted by fungi expert, or mycologist, Pete Whelihan, the group contracted in 2006 with the Grandfather Ranger District’s Adopt-a-Trail Program and undertook trail maintenance training at the USFS training facility in Woodlawn, North Carolina. Program coordinator Pat Wilson taught us the requisite “non-motorized” hand-labor means of maintaining wilderness access. FOLG adopted the Devil’s Hole Trail in 2006 and, in 2014, added care of forestry trails on the canyon’s west side: Bynum’s Bluff, Cabin and Babel Tower Trails, each joined by the main north–south footpath paralleling the river, the Linville Gorge Trail. Many volunteer groups, including scouts, cooperate in keeping these wonderful trails open.

Finally, words fail to describe the magnitude of the debt I owe to my beloved friend and companion Dorothy Watson, with whom I moved to the Falls and Gorge area in 1993. Together, we learned about the birds, trees and wildflowers of the wilderness while exploring its many trails. My best friend, Pete Whelihan, brought his expertise with wild mushrooms to Gorge forays and continues to sell wild species to the chefs of Asheville from his My-Co Gardens farm in Alexander, North Carolina. Ms. Wendy Funk at the Linville Falls Lodge and Spears Restaurant and Ms. Martha Piercy at the Linville Falls General make the little community an especially friendly, hospitable place from which to launch gorge adventures.

My two late brothers, Brendan and Pete, inspired the creation of River of Cliffs by their own appreciation for this unique and richly storied wilderness area.

INTRODUCTION

If you put your finger on a map of western North Carolina, and onto one of the oldest mountains in the world, the venerable Grandfather in the Blue Ridge Mountains, you should be able to trace the course of the Linville River southward from its sources as it runs through a plateau of rolling farm country to the small village of Linville Falls. The river flows under the Blue Ridge Parkway at milepost 316, becoming for a short distance a part of the National Park System. Well before this point, it continues to flourish as a popular trout stream. In the Falls park, it twists and almost doubles back on itself, flowing by a campground and a visitor center to a point where its course is parted in two by a midstream rock formation, the “Upper Falls.” Suddenly morphing its dynamics (or hydraulics, rather) from placid stream to churning whitewater, it narrows and plummets in two distinct stages to the choppy waters of a circular “Plunge Basin.” Here the Linville River earns its Native American sobriquet Eeseeoh (“River of Many Cliffs”), as it snakes its turbulent way below sheer precipices and around colossal boulders. And here indeed is a primordial place, where man and his incursions seem puny and fleeting—the Linville Gorge Wilderness Area. For some fourteen miles, the river meanders through a canyon so rugged and hazardous that only a series of primitive trails serves to make the area passable. High over visitors’ heads tower the silent sentinels known as Hawksbill and Table Rock. There are also other rock formations (typically of Chilhowie quartzite), such as the Sitting Bear, Wiseman’s View, the Chimneys, the North Carolina Wall and Sphynx Rock, terminating to the southeast in Shortoff Mountain, which oversees the Linville’s mingling with the waters of the Catawba River in Lake James.

From its origins in the high country of the Blue Ridge to its terminus in the Catawba Valley, the river descends some three thousand feet, and it is this activity that has, over the course of eons, created the gorge. In fact, the Linville Falls area forms what scientists call a “geologic window,” through which the actions of plate tectonics millions of years ago can be seen as in a cross-section of the earth’s history. The theory has it that the collision of the North American with the African continent thrust older, metamorphic rock over younger, sedimentary rock in a reversal of the normal erosion process. Originally, the Linville River flowed over the edge of the mountains at a point twelve miles downstream; in so doing, it eroded the softer rock beneath the harder, metamorphic layer. This undermining process caused a steady series of collapses as the waterfall gradually moved its way upstream to its present location.

For generations, the Linville Gorge has been a popular destination for sightseers and lovers of the outdoor life, including hikers, campers, painters, rock climbers, hunters and fishermen. University and government scientists have long taken an acute interest in the area, studying its geology, its flora and fauna and even certain mysterious phenomena associated with nearby Brown Mountain. The U.S. Army Special Forces made use of it for a period in the 1960s, as it resembled the Central Highlands of Vietnam. In the early nineteenth century, the Gorge was already well known as an exceptionally wild and romantic spot, “a savage place…holy and enchanted” as the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge might have described it. To Native Americans, the Gorge was a favorite summering spot, cool and filled with abundant game animals. Unfortunately, the colorful legend that Table Rock Mountain was Attacoa—the mystic sacrificial altar of the Cherokees—was spun out of the dreams of early travel and tourism promoters. More recently, the spectacular terrain of the Gorge has been featured in a Hollywood movie, director Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans, based on the novel by James Fenimore Cooper. Today, the area is a base for the North Carolina Outward Bound School, which utilizes the demanding physical challenges of the terrain for intensive outdoors education.

The Gorge is a unique ecosystem, home to an abundance of wildlife and plant species. Heller’s Blazing Star and Mountain Golden Heather are but two examples of the rare flora sheltered there. It is also one of the few intact areas of old-growth forest in the eastern United States. Among the rare and endangered species in the Linville Gorge are varieties of chameleons and turtles. Typical among the woody growth are eastern white pine; Carolina hemlock; Fraser magnolia; red maple; red, black and white oak; tulip poplar; flame azalea; rosebay; Catawba and Carolina rhododendron; mountain laurel; and chinquapin. Sand myrtle, turkey beard and blueberry are also abundant. Animal life in the Gorge includes deer, bear, beaver, wild geese, otter and ruffled grouse. In 1987, peregrine falcons were introduced into the high cliffs south of Table Rock and are a protected species there. I have mentioned some of the striking geological formations that give the Gorge its gorgeous vistas. On the canyon’s east side, Jonas Ridge runs south from Sitting Bear to Hawksbill to Table Rock and the Chimneys and Shortoff. Each of them presents a distinctive profile, especially when viewed from a distance. On the western rim of the gorge—following the ridgeline formed by Linville Mountain—is a dramatic outcropping just off the bumpy dirt road. Wiseman’s View has long been a favorite lookout point from which the famous Brown Mountain Lights are occasionally visible. The forty-one-plus miles of official trails offer access to the river below; their unusual names preserve some of the past history of the Gorge (Spence Ridge, Bynum Bluff, Erwin’s View and others). Trails can be steep and demanding, even dangerous in places, and they often present challenges to even the hardiest of hikers. Several of the trails, especially the ones to the views of the Falls, were created in the early years of the twentieth century by a colorful poet and outdoorsman from Charleston, South Carolina, named A.M. Huger, or “Chucky Joe.”

In 1950, Linville Gorge was declared a wild area by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The 7,575-acre tract was officially included in the National Wilderness System in 1964. With the passage of the North Carolina Wilderness Act in 1984, the size of the protected area was increased to its present 12,000 acres. The U.S. Forest Service is the federal agency responsible for the Gorge, actively managing the place to preserve its character as an “untrammeled wilderness” by closing it to logging, road building and vehicular traffic, as well as to any commercial development. In addition, usage in certain areas, such as the peregrine falcon nesting sites, was restricted.

The National Park Service oversees the Linville Falls Recreation Area, about two miles along a paved spur road off the Blue Ridge Parkway. Here there is also a trail system, a visitor center and facilities for camping and picnicking, as well as a series of spectacular overlooks of the Falls. Once a commercial attraction owned by the Hossfield family, the Falls passed into parkway management thanks to a donation made by John D. Rockefeller at the urging of local lawyer and civil libertarian Marion C. Wright.

The wilderness is a world of enchantments, but it can be a highly dangerous place, as well, unforgiving of those who are careless. Accidents, even fatalities, in the area have been many, including two deaths from falls in 2001. The Burke County Emergency Service averages between forty and fifty rescue missions a year in the Gorge. According to a county spokesperson, while fatalities in the wilderness are infrequent, “the number of non-fatal accidents is on the rise.” In turn, the increasing popularity of the Gorge has put the area itself at risk (over thirty thousand people a year visit the wilderness). The irresponsible behavior of a growing number of casual visitors, for example, has left some trails badly littered. This is only one of several major problems threatening the area. In November 2000, a fire in the Brushy Ridge area damaged over ten thousand acres in the Gorge—the result of an unattended campfire. Today, a permit system limits the number of overnight summer visitors, but human impact remains considerable. The worst blow dealt the Gorge in recent memory has been the blight of the invasive hemlock woolly adelgid, responsible for the loss of most of the old hemlock giants but not the complete destruction of the species here.

No verbal description can hope to convey the sensations awaiting one who visits the Falls and the Gorge, or even the charming community nearby, which over the years has managed to resist large-scale tourist development to remain a comfortable home base for visitors as well as a place with a distinctive history of settlement and use. In 2015, the Linville Falls General opened its doors to offer food, gear and firewood to a stream of visitors from around the globe. There is an indefinable quality about the Gorge that lures one with a deep sense of connectedness to wild space. A person quietly attentive to its features may come to feel a deep sense of oneness with nature here, as though the forest and peaks had just emerged from the shaping hands of their Creator. The collection of pictures and words I have gathered here do not aim to reproduce that unique authentic experience. Every encounter with the Gorge and the Falls seems to leave me with a welter of vivid impressions:

Knobby roots of the rhododendrons clutching the black forest loam. Ripples and slivers of milky quartz undulating through the mossy granite. And the sheer monoliths whose smooth sides glisten with spring water or loom high overhead, speckled with hoary olive lichen.

Dense stands or “bays” of dog-hobble swaying along the river banks. The greenbrier vine (smilax) like ripsaw teeth looping the limbs of mountain laurel in the sunless grottoes; “hells” they call them, so close compacted they devour the daylight.

And from the majestic Hawksbill and her sister peaks the ridgelines are rolling on to a haze of infinity, while far below the silent river glistens like a tinsel strip. As you climb down towards it, the river begins roaring. On the ascent, it dwindles away below to a whisper like the breezes in the hemlocks.

“Hey! Smells like a skunk’s been through here” (you pause to snuff the rank odor). “Or it’s that old stinkweed,” someone ventures. “No. Sorry. You’re both wrong. It’s galax, its old dry leaves mulching into the duff. And whenever you catch a whiff of that funky fermented odor, look closely by for a patch of these shiny round leaves, with wrinkly edges, sitting low on the ground. That’ll be your galax. Deep green in the summer, wine red in the frosty days of winter. Long time collected by the locals in bundles for sale to florists.”

And so the experiences engage, entwine, knitting the fabric of vivid memories.

Appreciation for such experiences, however, can be heightened by an awareness of what others have left in the way of testimonial to their wonder and respect for the place. This collection, then, serves as an introduction to and a record of one of earth’s enchanted places, forbidding yet delightful: Linville Falls and the Linville Gorge Wilderness Area. The selections gathered for this reader appear in chronological order, from the early days of the 1752 diary of the Moravian bishop August Spangenberg and the Pennsylvania Gazette’s report on the Indian attack on the Linville hunting party in 1766 to later fictional uses of the wilderness for settings and the anecdotes of tourists.

I should mention here that in order to preserve the flavor of the original documents, various irregularities in spelling and capitalization have been retained; thus, “Linvill” and “Lynvil” are variant spellings of Linville, and Tablerock is used for Table Rock. We also read “pine blank” for point blank, noting Horace Kephart’s gloss on “pint black” in Our Southern Highlanders (1913): “Pint blank is a superlative or an epithet, ‘We jist pint blank got it to do.’” Some of the anecdotes retailed in River bid to become icons: Culgee Watson strutting below the Sitting Bear in his peacock feather costume; Franklin’s mad dash up the Gorge in trousers bristling with venomous snakes; the photographs of D.R. Beeson, with their Asiatic landscape painting effects of mist-shrouded peaks with dwarf trees in dawn rain. The cumulative effect is extraordinary and fulfills the Irish poet W.B. Yeats’s call for artists who would work in the mind and memory of Nature for their subjects.

It may be remembered that many of the more flowery, even romantic pieces of writing about the area served a commercial agenda. Intended to boost the Southern Highlands not only as a vacation wonderland of scenic beauty, plentiful game for sport and cool elevations “above the sweltering plain,” these narrations also promoted the rich timber and mineral resources of the region. A case in point is Shepherd M. Dugger’s Balsam Groves of the Grandfather Mountain, written for the Linville Improvement Company and plugging the area with unabashed hype. Reading the record in such a historical context needn’t spoil the charm of our writer’s gushy posturing, for it is balanced with brilliant thumbnail sketches that inform and delight.

My primary goal in selecting materials was to provide the reader with scarce and out-of-print records, with unpublished sources, with old histories and old images. Readily available sources such as hiking and rock-climbing guides would be extraneous here; they can be purchased at bookstores or found online. When readers compare the old-time accounts with their own impressions of the Falls and the Gorge, they will be pleasantly surprised at how the area has managed to retain its power to produce emotions of awe and wonder. Ultimately, that is the wild glory of this place, this Land that Time forgot; its primordial tracts await the explorations of generations to come.

1

THE SPANGENBERG DIARY

In the fall of 1752, the Moravian bishop August Spangenberg received a warrant from Earl Granville, one of the eight Lords Proprietors of North Carolina, to seek out one hundred thousand acres in the vast territory for the brotherhood to settle on. In the company of a surveyor and several Moravian Brethren, Spangenberg traveled west, remarking on the living conditions of the Indians and the white settlers as he passed through. The party passed the sites of present-day Morganton and Blowing Rock before opting for the tract named Wachovia at what is now Winston-Salem. The original Spangenberg papers (twenty-three pages of field notes in miniscule handwriting) reside in the Salem Archives of the North Carolina Office of Archives and History in Raleigh.

Nov. 19th. From camp on the middle river of the three rivers flowing into the Catawba near Quaker Meadows, not far from Table Mountain. We reached here last Thursday, and made our camp, and went out to see the section, riding into the night. We found everything needed for a settlement,—very fertile lowlands, the best we have seen in North Carolina, which can be cultivated year after year without impoverishing them, for they lie at the foot of steep, rich hills, from which the soil washes down, enriching the meadows. Wheat and corn can be grown.

The tract is well watered, with springs, little streams, and creeks, and the water is as beautiful and sweet as one could wish. In the lower part of the tract we have the [Johns] River, which is half as large as the Lecha. Above we have the two branches [Wilson Creek and Mulberry Fork], forming a fork, each being perhaps twice as large as the Manocasy at Bethlehem. They are crystal clear, so that one can see the stones on the bottom even where the water is deep.

There are tall, strong trees; also young growth. There are good meadows for pasturage, and many reeds, which are still green,—otherwise our horses would starve.

Nov. 24th. From camp in the forks of the third river [Upper Creek in Burke County] that flows into the Catawba near Quaker Meadows. Perhaps five miles from Table Mountain. This is the fifth tract that we have selected, and contains seven or eight hundred acres,—a fine piece of land, lying on two creeks.

The land is very rich, and has been much frequented by buffalo, whose tracks are everywhere, and can often be followed with profit. Frequently, however, a man cannot travel them, for they go through thick and thin, through morass and deep water, and up and down banks so steep that a man could fall down but neither ride nor walk!

This tract lies not far from No. 4, perhaps a good mile to the west, and the way is not bad when one knows it.

The wolves here give us music every morning, from six corners at once, such music as I have never heard. They are not like the wolves of Germany, Poland, and Livonia, but are afraid of men, and do not usually approach near them. A couple of Brethren skilled in hunting would be of benefit not only here but at our other tracts, partly to kill the wolves and panthers, partly to supply the Brethren with game. Not only can the skins of wolves and panthers be sold, but the governor pays a bounty of ten shillings for each one killed.

2

ROYAL GOVERNOR TRYON ON THE LINVILLE MASSACRE

In a letter dated July 30, 1766, colonial governor William Tryon relates to his surveyor, John Stuart, the scantily known details of a surprise Indian attack on the Linville hunting party. Most of the letter describes the establishment of boundaries between the Cherokees and the whites, following a royal proclamation of 1763, and is included here as revealing the existing tensions between the indigenous peoples and the colonists.

Brunswick 30th July 1766.

Since my letter to you of the 17th last month I have laid before his Majesty’s Council of this province our correspondence on the subject of Indian affairs and the following is a copy of the Resolution of the Council on that business Vidt.

His Excellency communicated to this Board letters of correspondence on Indian affairs from Mr. Stuart, Superintendent of the Southern District with respect to a boundary line between this province and the hunting grounds claimed by the Cherokee Indians, and it is the opinion of this Board that his Excellency direct the Surveyor General by himself or his deputies to run such lines as the Governor shall think proper to quiet the Indians, and secure the western inhabitants in their legal possessions. And as there is no fund approved for this contingency, and that the service may be impeded it is also the opinion of this board, that the Governor may issue his warrants to the Receiver General of his Majesty’s quit rents for such sums of money as may be found necessary to carry the above service into execution, and that upon the meeting of the assembly application be made to reimburse the sums so drawn for.

I am sorry to find by the favor of your letter of the 24th of July delivered me by Mr Barnett that you are obliged to postpone your intended visit to me, as I am now anxious to see you and ready to consult with you on the proper measures to be taken relative to the demands of the Cherokees. I shall acquaint the inhabitants of the back country of this province of the hostile disposition of some of the Indian tribes, and the probability of a rupture, at the same time strongly recommend to them to avoid all opportunities of giving them a pretence to commit hostilities and to caution them to be on their guard in case the Indians should make any inroads on them. If the Cherokees permit agreeable to their first talk, the line to be run from Dewis’s corner a north course to the mountains, and from thence a strait course to Chiswell’s mines, I believe the inhabitants of Mecklenburg and Rowan Counties will be extremely well satisfied and upon the execution of this agreement I am willing to advance £100 for the cost and charges of such presents, as you may think most acceptable to the Cherokee Indians. If the above line could be run by the end of September and you could accompany me, I should not dislike to be present as it might not only prevent any little jealousies that might arise between the settlers, and the Indians but give me an opportunity to take a view of the back country.

I this day received information that one William Linville, his son, and another young man who were gone over the mountains at the head of the Yadkin to hunt, that in the first week of this month they were surprised by the Indians, that Linville and his son were killed, that the young man made his escape wounded to his settlement, where I am informed he is since dead of his wounds. I cannot as yet learn of what tribe or nation these Indians were.

NOTE: It is likely that the Linville party was hunting in violation of the king’s proclamation prohibiting whites from entering land west of the Blue Ridge. In 2015, the National Park Service erected a plaque at the Linville Falls Recreation Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway identifying the attackers as Shawnees. The full inscription reads: “Death on the Long Hunt. In 1766, along the banks of this river, William Linville and his son were killed by the Shawnee while on a long hunt. The Shawnee, who were on their way to attack the Cherokees, feared that Linville’s hunting party would discover their presence and alert the nearby Cherokee. Because the Linville party was on an extended hunt, lasting from six months to a year, they may have amassed a very valuable stash of furs—another likely reason for the attack. Today, this river carries the Linville name.”